


Tinder Date

by ponderinfrustration



Series: Tender Increments [1]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, First Meeting, Tinder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-20
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-04-25 05:44:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14372181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: Nadir convinces Erik to download Tinder, and he matches with a pretty girl named Christine. And before he knows it, a first date leads to more.





	1. 1

He was drunk when he downloaded the app and made the account. Definitely desperately drunk, but he thanks any deity that may be listening that he still had the sense to set his picture to one showing only the good side of his face. He was still drunk when he started what Nadir termed “swiping”, and found his finger moving right more times than he rightly expected he would. There was very handsome young Navy man – blond hair and blue eyes and a grin that would shame the sun – and he was an instant yes. However, it was the girl who came after him who arrested Erik’s heart.

Blonde hair tumbling in waves down past her shoulders. Blue eyes the same as the sky behind her. The next picture was black and white – the girl, her eyes closed, head tilted back, standing behind a microphone, as if she were the goddess of music sent down.

He swiped right before he even realised it.

He rejected a whole string of contenders (and Nadir was muttering about swiping for him) when his phone buzzed in his hand. A match. A match? Who would ever match with him?

Nadir grinned. “I knew there’d be someone.”

But Nadir’s words all faded before the picture of that girl. So endlessly pretty. So ethereal, so fae. He held the phone, helpless to do anything except stare, and next thing Nadir had the phone plucked from his hands.

“Well you have to message her!” His fingers were already tapping over the screen, faster than Erik had time to compute.

The girl. The music girl. She liked him. She swiped right. She found him attractive. Whatever could she have seen that no one else ever did?

“What—What’s her name?” His voice was little more than a croak, and Nadir’s grin widened.

“You don’t even know her name? It’s Christine. And she’s agreed to meet you for coffee tomorrow afternoon.”

And it was that line, more than any of the wine or the ill-thought shots of whiskey, that made Erik’s head spin.

He regained his senses lying on the couch, Nadir hovering beside him. “I knew I should have cut you off hours ago. You’re far too skinny to drink all that.”

A girl. Something about a girl.

Coffee. Tomorrow. Later today, probably.

His stomach churned and he rolled onto his side, heaving. “I can’t meet her,” he gasped between gags, “I can’t.”

“Oh, you can, Erik. And you will. Don’t worry. We’ll do you up lovely.”

* * *

 Nadir chooses the clothes he is to wear. Nadir carefully daubs the make-up onto his cheek to hide the worst of the damage. Nadir insists he eat something “so you don’t faint on the poor girl.” Nadir gives him a shot of whiskey “for courage” and walks him right to the door of the café to be sure he can’t turn back.

“I’ll be waiting out here for you. You’ll be fine.”

And Erik is such a tangled bundle of nerves and roiling nausea and a still-pounding headache that all he can manage is to nod.

He goes inside, blood rushing in his ears, feeling as if he is walking to his death. The girl will scream when she sees him up close. Will run, and that will be the end of it. He will be left sitting there, wishing with all his heart that he could just die then and there. That he had died last night, and never had to go through with this. That he had passed out long before Nadir even suggested the endeavour. That he had cancelled the meeting in the cold light of morning in spite of Nadir’s insistence that he had to go through with it. That the ground would open up and drag him down to hell where he belongs.

He recognises her the moment he lays eyes on her. That tumbling blonde hair still falling over her shoulders, a red scarf wrapped around her throat, cheeks faintly pink from the cold. He has a good mind to turn around and race out. He can outrun Nadir any day. He knows a thousand places to hide in this town, and Carton Estate is home to several of them. He could escape and never have to think of this whole sorry affair again.

And he is just considering the most graceful way to turn around and take off when she smiles at him. And his heart stalls.

It is like a hook beneath his navel pulling him on, that smile. As if the Fates are whispering in his ears, telling him to go on, murmuring that all will be well to fool him, to laugh at him when she does turn and flee. But his legs have a mind of his own, lead him on. They hold up just long enough for him to reach the chair, and he sinks heavily into it.

“Hello,” she says, and her voice is like that of the angels. “I’m Christine.”

And her hand is soft when it settles in his.

* * *

He floats out of the café, still talking to Christine. They have bonded over music. Rachmaninoff and Paganini and Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. The Decemberists. Lisa Hannigan. And they have agreed to meet up again. He will play and she will sing for him.

And she never asked about his face.

She surprises him with a hug before she departs, fading into the crowd down the street. And when he turns, at last, to face Nadir, Nadir is staring after Christine too, tears in his eyes.

“Oh, they grow up so fast,” he whispers more to himself than anything, and smiles at Erik. “I told you so.”


	2. 2

By the end of the second date he has fallen in love with her, but this he does not realise. Yes, he has been attracted to people before, he has certainly been infatuated (and it would be a step too far to say that his friendship with Nadir developed out of an infatuation, at least he tells himself that), but _love_? He has never been in love before, never been anywhere close to it, and he has no frame of reference for it.

But still. Christine occupies his every waking thought. She comes to him in his 3D Modelling seminars where he’s trying to reconstruct an estate house, and John Henry (a man whose whole thesis is based around dentistry, so why is he wasting time modelling houses?) pries the mouse from his hand so he can take over and replicate the windows himself. It is enough for Erik to snap back to reality, for the visions of tumbling blonde hair to disappear, and he swallows, his throat dry.

He uses her name in his Modelling Humanities Data assignment, relating different songs to her that he knows she likes. ‘Riverswim.’ ‘No Light, No Light.’ ‘Funeral Suit.’ She sang that one to herself at the beginning of their third date, when she was waiting for him to arrive, and later that night stood on stage and sang it at the open mic, and he thought he would die, then and there, with all of the aching in his heart at the sight of her, hair tumbling back in waves and her eyes closed, her voice straight from heaven.

He did not realise he was crying at the beauty of her until afterwards, when she took his hand, stinging from applause, and kissed his fingers, and then gently reached up and brushed away his tears. A little of the heavy make-up covering the bad side of his face came away on her fingertips, and she did not ask, only leaned into him and pressed a light kiss to his good cheek, the faintest pressure, almost not there, but how his skin burned with it and how it still burns now at the memory, and it is only in this moment, brushing the spot where she kissed him, that he realises he has not input any data in the last ten minutes, too lost in thoughts of her.

Of her, and tonight. Their fourth date in two weeks, though they have met for coffee on six different occasions, and when he was in the library checking out biographies of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich for his lit review, he found her in the stacks, grumbling to herself about how English-language historians have neglected the Estado Novo regime in Portugal, and there’s only one good book about Salazar, and she doesn’t want to give in and write about Franco but she might have to and _damn them all_.

The passion that flared in her eyes took his breath away, and together they left and went for tea and it was the one time they haven’t talked about music even in passing, as she continued her rant against narrow-sighted historians, and he nodded along only half understanding, and got her more tea when she stopped, and tried not to think that he will be still stuck here in thesis hell when she is abroad working on her own PhD.

But, he supposes, other people have made long-distance relationships work. And they always have Skype.

But none of that matters, not right now. Tonight is The Night, as Nadir keeps calling it, wiggling his eyebrows. Tonight he is going to kiss her, properly, on the lips, and maybe there will be some tongue involved (and he will not call it the shift, even though it technically is, because that sounds too casual, too disposable, and Christine is anything but disposable.) Tonight they will kiss (he hopes). And maybe kiss several times (he hopes desperately) and she will not ask about his face but he is going to have to tell her before and he knows he ought to be terrified, knows he _would_ be terrified, if it were anyone else, but it is Christine, and when she looks at him, with all of the softness of the world in her eyes, he knows he can trust her not to scream.

(But still, the thought of telling her is enough to make his stomach roil with nauseous anxiety, and he doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to eat anything.)

And maybe, if tonight goes well, after their fifth date, she will be the one to take his make-up off.


	3. 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is set in Maynooth, Ireland, which is actually my old uni town, and I probably should have made this clear before, but I only decided on it last night. If you want some photos of Maynooth (and probably, in time, other things relevant to this fic) then check out: littlelonghairedoutlaw.tumblr.com/tagged/tinder-date
> 
> I have one more chapter for this, which I will post on Friday.

Between his degree and his health insurance, there is an ever-growing list of things Erik cannot afford: a car, accommodation of his own, a good piano, a new mask, getting drunk on anything more expensive than the fiver wine from Aldi (though he shouldn’t be drinking at all), having a girlfriend. But he has resolved to afford two things: getting the old piano that once belonged to Nadir’s grandmother tuned, and having a girlfriend.

One of these he has already achieved, and it only dawns on him when the Italian waiter (a handsome gentleman, with a touch of hipster about him, and at any other time he would be the one to draw Erik’s eye) delivers his glass of Cabernet (he is only drinking to steel his nerves, and neither Nadir nor his doctors need ever know). Christine smiles at him over her Pinot Grigio, her eyes sparkling, brought out by the dark blue dress she’s wearing, and the image is so arresting that any appetite Erik had evaporates.

He sips his wine to try and regain some composure.

This is the first proper fancy date he’s ever been on. Their first date, of course, was to the out-of-the-way coffee shop across from the hotel, and their second was to the showing of _Good Bye, Lenin_ that the film society put on in the Iontas lecture hall, while their third was in the quiet half of the Roost, the part that Nadir always calls the old man pub. But this—this is the first time he’s ever been on a date in a restaurant.

The realization sends a bolt of sheer terror through him, and Christine must sense it because she reaches across the table and lays her hand gently on top of his.

A shiver runs down his spine at the contact.

“Are you okay?” Her voice is low, soft, a balm to his frazzled nerves, and he musters a smile for her.

“I’m fine. I’m...perfect.”  _You’re perfect,_ he means, and softly turns his hand to squeeze hers.

And after that, the meal passes without incident. Pasta for him, lasagne for her, and they talk of inconsequential things: the elderflower cider Christine sampled the other day when she was shopping; the art exhibition in the library; the new music they’ve listened to and it turns out they both loved the soundtrack to _The Band’s Visit_ , and he tells her about Nadir threatening to throw him out if he didn’t stop listening to it full blast at 3am while working on his modelling; the table quiz that the history society is having next week that John Henry has tried to convince him to go to even though history has never been his thing unless it’s involved music, but it turns out Christine is going and he decides to tell John tomorrow that he’s changed his mind and will go after all. All the simple things, but in the back of his mind the whole time is the niggling fact that he will have to tell her about his face.

He insists on paying the bill, and mentally calculates how many days he’ll skip lunch to justify it. Not that he eats much anyway, because he’d rather spend money on music and streaming makes him anxious. And it’s only a month since he had to re-string his violin after the snapping-in-his-face incident, and sometimes he can still feel it sharp against his bad cheek, as if it cut a new fissure.

Her fingers are so small, so slight, twined between his that it is almost as if they are not there at all, and he rubs his thumb over them. She leans into his arm at the touch, her head resting between his elbow and his shoulder.

So small. She’s so small, so delicate, and it would be so easy to hurt her, to break her, but the thought of her ever suffering like that makes tears spring to his eyes. How could anyone ever hurt her when she is the most precious creature in the world?

Instead of going for pints or back to his place or her place, he leads her to the South Campus, to the bench under the tree that legend claims has been there for more than six hundred years, and they settle side by side, the sky gold and vermillion in the distance over the canal.

Now. Now is the time.

“Christine,” he raises her hand to his lips, kisses it lightly and releases it, “there’s something I have to tell you.”

* * *

 

A birth deformity, the fissures in his cheek like canyons etched. There is only so much that the make-up can do, the fillers, and really he needs a mask, but her eyes water as she traces them lightly with her fingertips. “Do they hurt?” She whispers, and he shakes his head.

“Never.” It is one of the few things he has ever been grateful for.

“That’s good. I’m-I’m glad.” And she takes a shuddering breath, her fingers drifting down, brushing over the scar that twists his upper lip, almost hidden beneath the thick foundation. “And this?”

“Harelip. I had surgery when I was a baby. It’s—it’s part of the syndrome I was born with.” The same syndrome that killed his father, but nobody knew much of anything about it at the time, or even realised that that’s what it was, that he might have it too. It was only later, when he was seventeen and one of his lungs spontaneously collapsed in the sharpest pain he’s ever own, that anyone put the pieces together, though in hindsight it was obvious, with his height, and the length of his fingers, and the depression in his chest. So many signs, and everyone just thought he took after his father and he did but it’s always been far more worrying than that.

But she nods, and her hand drops from his face, squeezes his fingers. “Tell me about it.”

* * *

 

Her arms come warm around him before he has finished, and he takes a shuddering breath, draws her closer. “I don’t want you to suffer,” she whispers, her voice muffled by his chest. “You have to be careful, you have to.”

And he is about to promise her that he is careful, always, that even if he slips and forgets his medications then Nadir has his back, when she pulls back, and lays her hand on the nape of his neck to draw him down, and his words are lost with the press of her lips. His breath hitches, and he swallows, gasps, and however he has imagined his first kiss with her (and he must surely have dreamt of it happening in a hundred, a thousand different ways, under streetlamps and across restaurant tables and cradled close on the couch and beneath the neon lights of the Roost on a Thursday night with Florence + the Machine pounding through his blood) but he never dreamt that it might be like this, after telling her about the inherent fault in his very life, and he whimpers overwhelmed, tears burning his eyes, his heart constricting.

She pulls back, her eyes wide, and his brain is crying out  _no, don’t_ even as she squeaks, “I’m sorry! I didn’t—”

He gathers all he has to get his voice and cut her off. “Don’t. I want—” _I want this, I want you, I want every breath,_ and he leans in, brushes her lips with his own and her mouth opens and his tongue dips inside, and he can still taste the Pinot Grigio sweet off her sigh.

And when her tongue brushes his, there are no doubts.


	4. 4

They kiss. They kiss so many times that Erik’s lips are left tingling and swollen and Christine’s are the same, her lipstick smeared. He does the gentlemanly thing and wipes it away, then leans in and kisses her again, half-pulling her on top of him, and it does not matter that they are on a bench in a public place. It is after dark and besides, nobody walks this way unless they are somewhat under the weather or otherwise distracted. It’ll hardly matter to them.

They kiss, and then they walk, their fingers entwined, and Erik longs to kiss her again, to give up breathing just so he can keep kissing her. He never really liked kissing before, always felt nauseous thinking of the mess of it and none of the encounters he ever had ever needed much in the way of repetitive mouth kisses. But tonight his limbs are hardly connected to him, and his heart throbs with longing just to kiss her and hold her so close to him that they are in danger of melding into one.

They reach the lights at the cross beside the Roost, and when they are waiting for red to become green he dips his head to brush his lips over hers one more time. And then they are across the road and standing before the bouncer at the door to the club, who gives their ID only a perfunctory glance before nodding to let them in.

Erik throws back one shot. And one shot becomes two and his heart is pounding so much he tries to remember if he took his medication this morning or if he forgot it again (he took it, wanting everything to be just right for their date), and Christine’s cocktail is called a Sex on the Beach and he can’t help snorting as he tastes the peach off her lips and sweeps her away in his arms on the dancefloor.

John Henry grins at him and gives him the thumbs up over the shoulder of a girl that must be Kate, and even knowing that he’ll probably be interrogated tomorrow working on their joint project, Erik grins back and pulls Christine closer. Later, when he stumbles on weak legs to the bar to get Christine another cocktail and a pint of water for himself, it is Nadir serving him. And Nadir gives him that look as if to say, _take it easy_ , but Erik is so high that Nadir could be muscling him out the door to bed and he would not care. Instead of making a face like he normally might, he leans across the bar and grabs Nadir’s shirt, pulls him closer and kisses him on the cheek. “Thank you,” he whispers in his ear, his voice hoarse under the music. “Thank you.” If it were not for Nadir he would not be here, would not have Christine, and it has only been two weeks but it has been a lifetime, a perfect stretch in the cosmos that fills his heart and he kisses Nadir’s cheek again, tears dripping down his face and there are not enough words in any language to thank him for bringing her into his life, and Christine would say it in Swedish or Portuguese and he would get palpitations listening to her and it would still not be enough.

They stay until closing time, dancing and kissing and holding each other, and then with the flood of the crowd they stumble out, Christine still an angel on his arm, giggling in his ear as she kisses his bad cheek, drowning out the echoing pound of the music. They stop for a pizza and carry it home, back to his and Nadir’s place, and she holds it as he fumbles with the keys, gets the door open and flicks on the light. The place is half a kip but they are each past caring and he dumps the clothes off the couch as they settle onto it, put the pizza down on the table.

They kiss and share the slices, taste them in each other’s mouths, the spice of pepperoni and cream of the cheese, and before he quite realises it, Erik is lying flat on the couch and Christine on top of him, kissing his lips and his cheek and nuzzling into his throat, and if he died right now, if the ticking timebomb inside of his chest decided that this was enough, that twenty-five years, seven months, and nine days is all of the time allotted to him, Erik would not care. This has been the best of it, all he’s wished for, and as the tears prickle his eyes for the fifth or sixth time tonight he strokes her hair and whispers into her mouth, his voice gravelly and throat aching, “I love you.”

For the briefest of seconds, the words catch him by surprise. But it is the truest thing has ever spoken.

And her lips curl into a smile that he feels more than sees as she whispers back, “I love you too.” And his heart soars, and he has never felt so whole.

* * *

 

That is where Nadir finds them when he stumbles in half-blind with tiredness, Ellie on his arm. The two lovebirds pressed together, asleep on the couch, and he deposits Ellie in his own bed, comes back with the duvet from Erik’s and spreads it over them. It crosses his mind that he should wake Erik, should tell him to take the make-up off so he doesn’t break out in spots, but it would be cruel to wake him now. Instead he settles for smoothing back Erik’s hair, and as he cuts the lights he misses the moment that Erik’s eye flickers open, a rim of gold-hazel in the darkness, and seeing Christine asleep on top of him, and Nadir slipping out, his lips twitch into a slight private smile, before his eye closes and he drifts back into sleep. And in the stillness of the early morning, there is nothing that could be wrong in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final chapter for now. I may decide to continue this further, but I haven't decided yet. I am also considering two separate fics set in this same 'verse - one M-rated about Erik and Christine's first time, and the other looking at some of their later life together. But as I said, they're still in the thinking about stage.


	5. 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't intend to add this chapter, but it kind of just happened.

He is woken by movement, and his eyes flutter open to the blurry sight of Christine, kneeling beside him and stroking his hair. Her makeup is smudged, and his heart stutters at the sudden wonder of her here before him, as if she has been plucked right from his dreams.

She brushes a kiss lightly to his forehead, and he reaches up to catch her hand, twine their fingers.

Christ, but she’s beautiful.

“I have a nine o’clock lecture,” she whispers, her voice hoarse from sleep, from the singing and drinking and laughing.

“What—” he has to cough to clear the gravel from his own throat, “what time is it?”

“Seven. I want to change and get something to eat. And Nan will want to see that I’m all in one piece.” And she grins lopsidedly at him, and kisses his cheek. For a moment he struggles to remember who Nan is, but it is Lilly Valerius, her godmother that she lives with.

Though he has never met the woman, he feels an odd kinship with her. He, too, would want to make sure Christine was all in one piece if he had not seen her all night.

There is just one thing on his mind.

“Will I see you later?” And he brushes his lips to her knuckles.

“Are you free for lunch?”

Lunch. Did he have anything planned? No, he was going to skip it. She probably wouldn’t like him skipping it. He can skip it Monday instead and it would work out the same. “I am if John Henry isn’t interrogating me.” Lunch with Christine will be an excellent excuse to escape the clutches of John Henry, who is going to be absolutely insufferable all morning with his knowing looks and questions. And lunch with Christine is also going to save him from Nadir, who is going to be unbearably smug. _Didn’t I tell you Tinder was a great thing? And you wanted to back out? Look where you are now._ No, the one thing he certainly does not need is Nadir’s _I told you so_ routine.

“Then it’s a date.” And she kisses him again, her lips soft against his as he sighs into her mouth. Oh but he’d spend all morning kissing her if he could, and lectures bedamned.

A faint memory comes to him, of declaring his love in the early hours as she kissed him. And she said it back. She said it back and he could have died with the way his heart throbbed with feelings, and his eyes water again to think of it. She said it back. She loves him.

And he swallows, and brushes his thumb over the back of her hand, looking into her eyes. So blue. How did he never notice before how blue they are? Like the sky on a summer’s day, with flecks of a darker shade like the dress she’s wearing. If he could he’d capture that precise shade and wrap it around his heart forever. “I love you,” he murmurs, to be sure she knows it’s true, that it was not just the kissing talking, the alcohol and adrenaline of simply being with her, that he truly means it, with every single fibre of his being.

And she smiles again, a softer smile that makes his heart soar. “I love you, too.”

And with one more peck to his cheek, she’s gone. And his eyes water with missing her already.

* * *

 

He puts his phone charging, boils the kettle for tea and takes his medication with a slice of cold pizza. The remaining couple of slices he puts in the fridge for dinner. And he showers and combs his hair and half thinks he can still feel her hand smoothing through it, and inspects his cheek to be sure there’s no rash coming up from the makeup being on so long. Then he rubs in some moisturiser. It can have an hour to recover before he needs to put on the makeup again.

He really needs to save up for another mask.

There is no point in trying to snatch any more sleep. He knows well he would just lie awake, dreaming of her, wishing she were back in his arms. And he cannot settle to compose, though he needs to write for her, burns to. She needs all the pieces he could ever hope to put together, deserves them all dedicated to her. He cannot capture her in poetry, has always been useless at sketching or painting or sculpting. The only tribute he can pay is to make music for her, and he is helpless to do even that now, hasn’t a hope of settling to it.

He turns on his laptop, connects it to the speaker, and presses play on the playlist he’s made for her. All the songs trying to capture the sheer longing within him to breathe her in and hold her forever. And with the misty morning light filtering through the blinds, he closes his eyes and wraps his arms around himself, and sways slowly, dreaming that he is holding her again.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Date Night](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16090862) by [ponderinfrustration](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration)
  * [Birthday](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16604795) by [ponderinfrustration](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration)
  * [Unfolding](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16819069) by [ponderinfrustration](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration)




End file.
